Charlize Theron reveals the ‘unfair’ treatment of women in action movies: ‘It was just so insulting’

Hollywood star Charlize Theron opened up about what it is like to be a woman working in action movies, which is a genre typically dominated by men.

While appearing on the “Evolution of a Bada–s” panel during Comic-Con@Home on Friday, Theron talked about her experience working on the 2003 remake of the heist film “The Italian Job,” saying that she experienced “unfair” treatment on set during the prep phase of the movie.

“I realized there was still so much misconception around women in the genre,” Theron recalled, according to Fox News. “The only good thing that came out of that experience was that there was a real pressure to pull off those stunts with the actors – and that was the first time I experienced anything like that. But there was a very unfair process that went with that. I was the only woman with a bunch of guys, and I remember vividly getting the schedule in our preproduction and they had scheduled me for six weeks more car training than any of the guys.”

She explained that she was offended by the idea that she couldn’t learn as much as her male counterparts in the same amount of training time.

“It was just so insulting, but it was also the thing that put a real fire under my a– and I was like, ‘All right, you guys want to play this game? Let’s go,'” Theron continued. “I made it a point to out-drive all of those guys. I vividly remember Mark Wahlberg, halfway through one of our training sessions, pulling over and throwing up because he was so nauseous from doing 360s.”

Theron added that it was not until she appeared in the 2015 action movie “Mad Max: Fury Road” that she really hit her stride in that genre.

“It wasn’t until ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ came my way—that experience and what happened with that film really changed the trajectory for me,” she said. “I don’t think I will ever recover from the making of that film. There is a responsibility to hand that baton over, that it’s not just about you. Listen, it’s still disproportionate to our male counterparts out there, and we have to keep putting the pressure on our industry to change that.”

“I want my two young girls to grow up and not even think that this is weird or this is unusual or this is strange,” Theron concluded. “I want this to be normalized.”

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